How it is made and why
First the why. Curiosity. To see where the visitors to the website were coming from, that is where it started. Why not use Google Analytics you may ask. Well for one, the data Google collects is not yours and is sold to other parties for profit that you see nothing of. There's more, but I'll leave it at that for now.
Being a no-budget service with no commercial interests, beyond maybe self promotion, the requirements were to find tools and services that would be useful in achieving the goal to display the origin of an ip address used to connect to the website and present it on a map. And at the same time show and promote the alternative options on the Internet not dominated by 'Tech Giant$'.
Two primary components were needed, a mapping or cartographic display and the ability to find the location of an IP address as this connects to the web server. The web server has an intercept routine that detects and captures the IP address for each connection to the web server. Now how to use this IP address to find it's location. This turned out to be quite a challenge using only open public data sources, like IANA, ICAN and other registries.